Many of you will already be aware of the collaboration between AMD and the Ferrari Formula 1 team - indeed, we've written about it in these very pages previously. Simply put, AMD is far more than just another name on the car: AMD contributes in very real terms to the success of the Ferrari team.

Ferrari has deployed AMD processors and technology throughout its enterprise. That ranges from staff using Turion laptops to check their email, through to massive 400-node Opteron clusters used for modelling fluid dynamics in the wind tunnel. With such a big-name, glamorous sport to be associated with, AMD is keen to make sure people know about the cutting edge work it is doing with Ferrari - because it's interesting as well as effective. To that end, we went off to Mugello racetrack, just outside Florence in Italy, for the official unveiling of Ferrari's new F1 car and to chat to the technicians there about their work with AMD.

Crucial to the team's success is the Opteron processor. Why? Because so much of the car's design and engineering relies on high-powered computing systems. AMD is being used for:
Telemetry: During every race and practice session, data from the onboard computers are sent back from the car to the pit garage. This data needs to be crunched and analysed very quickly so that the engineers can extract race-defining information. Pit stop strategies, tyre decisions and fuel loads are all based on computer simulations of the race extrapolated from telemetry data.

Car design: The precision required to design every millimetre of the car obviously requires a high-powered CAD/CAM programme running on a meaty workstation.

Wind tunnel: Crucial to the speed of the car is the aerodynamics of the wings and the body shape. To test this, the team uses a wind tunnel and then records how the air flows over the car. By recording the airflow, they can work out how to make the car sleeker. This data recording is called Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD for short.

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O Shumacher quando questionado sobre esta parceria responde:

Well, obviously telemetry data is very important to us; it is crucial in designing the car," he told us."Our computer systems have been crucial, and we have very good partners in this respect. We have traditionally strong in these areas, perhaps more so than other teams... "

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Será alguma boca á parceria Toyota-Intel

Antonio Calabrese adiciona:

"If you look at AMD's dual core technology from a user's point of view - to us, it has been a chance to upgrade our systems without any big effort in terms of the systems, tests, so on. It was clear from the first time that this kind of migration was really a serious upgrade in terms of performance, but all we had to do was swap the CPU and upgrade the BIOS. That is what we did. It was a simple and easy enabling of the technology.

"I'm tired of technology which is difficult to integrate. We have to give serious performance to our users, we don't want to struggle with exotic cooling solutions and the like. The transition was really seamless.

"We found that the performance was roughly double for some configurations. That was without any problems of power and cooling. We doubled the performance in the same basic environment. This is really valuable for any IT systems environment."

Forbes is reporting that according to both technology advances and market share gains, AMD is expected to shoot past Intel in company performance and growth from now into 2007. AMD over the last couple of quarters has performed superbly, with good pricing and even better product offerings. Market share has risen significantly and even AMD's stock has jumped from about 36 points to 41 points within a week. Intel's price per share remains around 21 points.

Analysts are also predicting that Intel will not have the ability to catch up to AMD until Intel releases products on new 45nm fabrication processes, which isn't expected until 2008 claims Forbes. We reported earlier that AMD is transitioning its Fab 36 in Dresden to mass produce its next generation processors (both dual-core and quad-core) on a 65nm process. Intel on the other hand, has demonstrated that it has successfully started working on 45nm technology but its main production will be 65nm through to 2008.